A widely used type of electronic package comprises a housing which is generally rectangular or square having a plurality of pins extending from one of its surfaces. Quite often, as many as several hundred pins arranged on a grid pattern will extend from the surface of a package. The substrate package is connected to further circuitry by means of a socket which is mounted on a circuit board. The socket has a socket contact for each of the pins extending from the pin grid array (PGA) substrate. While the force required to insert an individual pin into an individual socket is relatively small, the force required to assemble a PGA substrate to a socket can be quite high when the substrate has several hundred pins. Also, it is essential when inserting the pins of the substrate into the socket contacts of the socket assembly to move the substrate in a direction which extends normally of its plane and to extract the substrate or remove the substrate from the socket assembly in the same manner. The pins are quite delicate, and if there is any cocking or lateral movement of the substrate during insertion or extraction, some of the pins may be damaged.
A variety of single purpose tools are available for either extracting or inserting substrates into a socket assembly, that is, tools which are capable of only one of the two operations. A lesser number of tools are known which are capable of both inserting and extracting substrates from sockets. U.S. Pat. No. 4,615,110 describes an insertion/extraction tool which is capable of use under circumstances where the sockets are very close together on the circuit board. This tool is relatively complex and has many moving parts so that it would be relatively expensive to produce.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,873,761 discloses an insertion/extraction tool for chip carriers and chip carrier sockets. This tool has a force multiplication system for the insertion operation; however, when the chip carrier is extracted from the chip carrier socket, the tool merely functions as a gripping tool and does not have any system for applying leveraged force to the extraction operation.
The present invention is directed to the achievement of a relatively simple and inexpensive tool for assembling substrates to, and disassembling substrates from, a socket which is mounted on a circuit board or the like.